Morlok, Elke

Senior Fellow: April–August 2022

Research Project: Sceptical Strategies in the Anti-Hasidic Propaganda of the Haskala in Eastern Europe (Eighteenth/Nineteenth Century)

At the beginning of the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskala, Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), the main figure of this movement in Western Europe, showed a positive attitude towards Kabbalistic ideas and concepts and even integrated some of them into his biblical commentaries. Other representatives of this initial period such as Solomon Maimon (1754–1800) and Isaac Satanow attempted to establish harmonious syntheses of Maskilic and Kabbalistic thought and, in the latter’s case, even printed Lurianic treatises for the first time.

In the later development of the Maskilic currents, however, and particularly in Eastern Europe, we find strong anti-Kabbalistic and anti-Hasidic polemics. Authors such as Yehuda Leib Mieses (1798–1831), who engaged in a zealous battle against Hasidism, Josef Perl (1773–1839) with his anti-Hasidic satires, and Isaac Baer-Levinsohn (1788–1869) launched harsh attacks against Hasidism. The complex relationship between Hasidism and the Maskilim has been fiercely debated in recent scholarship as we find various diverging approaches that these groups took towards one another. The proposed research project will include a thorough analysis of this multi-faceted entanglement between the two movements and their larger religio-cultural and socio-historical contexts.

The focus of the project will be to shed light on the hybrid sceptical strategies of anti-Hasidic and anti-Kabbalistic polemics found among Eastern European writers and the role they played in their efforts for economic, social, and cultural change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To what degree were the figures involved familiar with Kabbalistic and Hasidic materials? What were their sources and what were their channels of transmission? In what manner were their sceptical approaches employed in their assaults against Hasidic theories and practices shaped by these sources? Do they refer to earlier sceptical polemics against mystical trends in Judaism from either inside or outside Jewish cultures and traditions?

In a final step, the transition of these sceptical strategies from Eastern to Western Europe will be examined, as they are of the utmost importance for the further development of European intellectual history and its perception of mystical traditions, as exemplified in the Wissenschaft des Judentums and modern academic research.

Elke Morlok is research associate at the Bavarian Research Center for Interreligious Discourses at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany.